The 2016 awards season has just wrapped up — please see this post to congratulate this year’s Brodie winners! Also note that the Wheat & Tares blog has posted their 2016 award winners here.

It’s hard to talk about any kind ofcurrent eventsthese days, given the tsunami of insanity coming out of Washington D.C… I guess insanity is not really the right word (see this discussion of the problems with armchair psychoanalysing Trump), but I am having trouble coming up with replacements for words like “nuts” and “crazy”, etc. Does anyone know a good word for something that is royally messed-up in a bizarre and irrational way — without jumping to slurs about mental illness…?

There was one Mormon-related news story bundled in this week’s Trumpocalypse: apparently Trump wants to end the law that makes churches choose between their tax-exempt status and endorsing specific political candidates. Since Trump rode in on a wave of Evangelical Christians, it probably seems like a good idea to him, but it might do him more harm than good if liberal denominations were allowed to openly organize resistance to him. But the big question for us is whether the CoJCoL-dS would change its policy of pretending to be politically neutral.

They lose their buildings, and they lose their magazines. The church takes ownership of the hospitals and co-opts their conferences. Before you know it, instead of having their own meetings and their own budget and their own agenda, they are meeting in a three-hour block of church that is presided over by men who grant them meager budgets and approve/dictate their agendas. No longer do women even run this organization on their own. Can it be called a women’s organization if women do not own it?

It is referred to as an auxiliary. It is supplementary to the organization to which it belongs. Can it even be called a women’s organization when it is just an auxiliary to a larger one that is run entirely by men?

And here’s another kicker. In 1971, all adult women in the church became members of Relief Society. You can have been baptized at the age of 8, stopped attending church at the age of 13, and five years later when you turn 18, your name gets moved from the Young Women rolls to the Relief Society rolls. Can you boast the numbers of an organization that has no opt-in or opt-out procedure? Can you boast the numbers of an organization that has no control of its own membership rolls?

One other Mormon news item was that the Air Force ROTC will be moved from BYU to UVU because the new director refused to agree to abstain from coffee — a big item on the BYU “Honor Code”.

To close with some fun, here’s a comic about a Mormon family and the CoCJoL-dS sent out a letter to local leaders containing a mysterious puzzle! Have a good week and take care!